*''goal:'' Printing support working in all applications that can currently print, with print preview and customisable dialogs; no applications depending on libkdeprint, except for the printing kcm

*''goal:'' Printing support working in all applications that can currently print, with print preview and customisable dialogs; no applications depending on libkdeprint, except for the printing kcm

−

*help needed: Most of the necessary API is in place: KPrintPreview in kutils and KdePrint::createPrintDialog() in kdeui. We currently have no way to print pdf or ps files directly (as used by Okular, for example), but this is being worked on by John Layt. Almost complete.

+

*help needed: API is in place: KPrintPreview in kutils and KdePrint::createPrintDialog() in kdeui. We currently have no way to print pdf or ps files directly (as used by Okular, for example), but this is being worked on by John Layt. This will not be part of kdelibs at this point. Almost complete.

Contents

Plasma

goal: A basic panel is there; current work is to flesh it out into a more capable panel system. System tray and taskbar both need work as does a desktop containment with legacy support for the Desktop folder.

howto help: help is always welcome; there are a number of people contributing to plasma already but more help can make things go faster. If you want to help, join the irc channel #plasma or mail to panel-devel@kde.org

Konqueror

goal: Konqueror must be able to browse the web and to be used as a file manager again, I'm mostly aiming for "no regressions compared to KDE3"

howto help:

Help is most welcome. kfm-devel@kde.org is the place for discussion of both aspects of konqueror development. Web browsing seems in better shape than filemanagement right now, so small tasks are fixing regressions in the webbrowsing-related code in konqueror and its dependencies. For instance there is finally a patch now about fixing the non-working Return key in the location bar URL; I'm sure there's more like that.

Bigger tasks include:

defining a future for the sidebar code (*no showstopper if this is the last item on the list*) -- volunteer(s) needed!

finishing the integration of the dolphin part for file management.

expected time of arrival: november (if we leave out the sidebar changes), else december.

Dolphin

goal: I think Dolphin is in a quite acceptable state now and I'll have a lot of time during the next week to fix the most serious bugs. David Faure and Rafael Fernández López also investigate a lot of time in Dolphin related things so I'm optimistic that Dolphin should be in a good shape for KDE 4.0.

howto help:

I'm concerned a little bit whether the Dolphin KPart is matured enough for getting Konqueror in shape. Maybe David can comment whether some help is needed in this area (I've set David to CC).

I'm not sure about the state of Nepomuk. Currently the performance is too slow for sorting items by tags or rating. It would be possible to use an internal cache in Dolphin for this, but this would only reduce the time from O(n*log(n)) to O(n) and the problem is n: reading e. g. 30 items takes several seconds... Maybe Sebastian Trüg could need some support. In the worst case I'd suggest to remove the "sort by tags" and "sort by rating" feature in Dolphin for KDE 4.0.

expected time of arrival: My plan is that all serious bugs get closed until the end of September. No known showstoppers are left :-)

Kate

goal: The KDE 4 version of Kate should at least inlude the known KDE 3 features with additions. We have some new stuff around already but some old is lacking correct porting (beside new introduced bugs). There is a massive need for bugfixing and help getting old stuff back to work, like printing.

howto help:

fix printing Fixed by Anders, 2007-10-20

fix shortcut settings Fixed by mstocker

rendering bugfixes seems to be ok (fixed everything I know), by mstocker

Printing

goal: Printing support working in all applications that can currently print, with print preview and customisable dialogs; no applications depending on libkdeprint, except for the printing kcm

help needed: API is in place: KPrintPreview in kutils and KdePrint::createPrintDialog() in kdeui. We currently have no way to print pdf or ps files directly (as used by Okular, for example), but this is being worked on by John Layt. This will not be part of kdelibs at this point. Almost complete.

Sound

no showstopper: do some more automatic tests that all sound devices work as expected

done.

done.

Playing short ogg files only plays the start of the sound (which can be nothing at times). This is a showstopper for notification sounds. Apparently xine's ogg demuxer discards some data if the last read buffer is too small.

howto help: I certainly want help. But I don't know how I could label any of the tasks as small because for most things you need quite a good overview... :-( Mailinglists: phonon-backends@kde.org or kde-multimedia@kde.org, IRC: #phonon ping Vir

Local audio playback is working quite OK, but there are some issues that are still open:

There's a report that outputting to a dmix: ALSA device using a hardware mixing capable soundcard made mixing not work at all (don't ask me why), so the ALSA device name choosing algorithm might need to become a bit smarter. I think the safest bet for now is to use the default:CARD=... device string, but with that you can only choose what card you want, not what device on that card (I don't have hardware where this would make a difference, so no idea if it's needed).

Even though defaults.pcm.ipc_gid is set to audio and defaults.pcm.ipc_perm is set to 0660, dmix does not work for more than one user at the same time (both users are in the audio group). A workaround is to set ipc_perm to 0666, but a real fix would be nicer.